Microsoft to spend a billion marketing Windows Phone 7 and Kinect

A million dollars isn't a cool amount of money to spend on marketing for your new phone platform and motion-sensing gaming peripheral. You know what is cool? A billion dollars. That's apparently the current company line over at Microsoft, which, according to TechCrunch, will spend $400 million on advertising for Windows Phone 7, and an additional half a billion dollars on marketing for the Kinect, according to the New York Post (via All Things Digital).

According to the reports, that money will be spent on cross-promotions with various other brands, like Burger King and Kellogg's cereal, new media mainstays like a buyout of the front page of YouTube, as well as ad buys on hit shows like "Glee" and "Dancing with the Stars." From what we've heard, both of those titles incorporate a great deal of dancing, which seems like a reasonable fit for a certain Kinect launch title. We're speaking, of course, about Fighters Uncaged.